Screwtape Letters

I was doing some blog searching yesterday and found a friend's blog that she has just started updating again, but I read through some of her old posts (I love reading other people's blogs) and found this quote from Screwtape Letters. First, C.S. Lewis never ceases to bring me back to my knees. God gave him an amazing mind and he used it for the glory of God. How much better does it get? He has an amazing ability to look at and analyze life and then explain it in a way that brings a better understanding to his readers. Even if you have already heard the truth he is sharing, he shares it so that you understand it better or differently and are freshly convicted. Second, this just fit much too perfectly with my last post and the struggles I am facing right now. For those of you who haven't read Screwtape Letters I suggest reading it at your earliest convenience or even sooner, it is just brilliant. It is a series of letters written from one fictional devil to another explaining how best to tempt a human. The enemy referenced in the Letter is therefore God. Enjoy...

“It is far better to make them live in the Future. Biological necessity makes all their passions point in that direction already, so that thought about the Future inflames hope and fear. Also, it is unknown to them, so that in making them think about it we make them think of unrealities. In a word, the Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most completely temporal part of time-for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays…Hence nearly all vices are rooted in the future. Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead…To be sure, the Enemy wants men to think of the Future too-just so much as is necessary for now planning the acts of justice or charity which will probably be their duty tomorrow….He does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. We do. His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him. But we want a man hag-ridden by the Future-haunted by visions of an imminent heaven or hell upon earth-ready to break the Enemy’s commands in the present if by so doing we make him think he can attain the one or avert the other…”